The copilot opportunity for records - and how to not stuff it up.

Copilot is a huge opportunity for records.

It holds the promise of not just saying to people "this stuff is valuable" but saying "this stuff is valuable, and here is the bit that's valuable for what you're doing, right now."

That's a huge opportunity for records - because for decades, we've been trying to say that records are valuable, and failing largely because when someone says "show us how," the records we have are of such low quality that we're not able to do so.

There is a problem to be overcome first - one that everyone in records should be positioning themselves as the answer to.

Confidentiality.

We might also refer to it as "security by obscurity."

I'm calling it confidentiality, because it's really about the walls that we should have drawn in our organisation that say "you don't need to know about this, so you're just not going to have access to it" - this can get out of control, but there are always reasonable boundaries that can be drawn.

People with low security clearances, should not have access to high security stuff.

People not in payroll, the right part of HR, or team management shouldn't have access to payroll data.

Etc.

Pragmatic walls.

The gain copilot is going to help people make is the Lew Platt gain - "if HP knew what HP knows, we'd be three times as productive."

Where this becomes a problem, is that because copilot will read from the corpus available to a user (just like any search engine), it's going to read from all the information that they have access to, that they shouldn't have access to (all the information previously secured by obscurity - because no one was going to click through and read all that stuff while staying employed, now Copilot will do it for them!).

This is records management's moment - because we've been working on content segmentation forever, we know how to think about it, and we know what to do.

The risk is that we stuff it up.

There's a tendency in records to say "oh, someone wants help with records, so they naturally need all of it" - ie. every single bit of the continuum/lifecycle/choose your paradigm, an EDRMS, functional classification etc. etc.

We need to remember that what our organisations want access to, is the value of copilot.

What they want to remove, is the risk of exposing information to someone from whom it should remain confidential.

All we have to do, is focus on that.

Segment the content so that the people who should have access, have access.

And the people who don't have access, don't.

And our star will rise.

If we try and give them everything, they'll just find someone else to deliver the things they actually want.

Because they want the value of copilot, without the risk.

That's it.